ArcaMax

Several months ago, before anyone imagined the current crisis, I read a book called "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl.

Frankl was a Jewish Viennese psychiatrist who was captured by the Nazis during World War II and managed to survive four concentration camps including the infamous Auschwitz and Dachau.

He went through the ordeal ...Read more

February was a cruel month for the Chinese corporate giant Huawei Technologies, and rightly so. The "high-risk" telecommunications company with deep ties to Beijing's communist dictatorship deserves an even crueler April and a disastrous 2020 marked by criminal investigation, criminal indictment and billion-dollar lawsuits.

For several years ...Read more

President Donald Trump is extending the nation's shutdown at least until the end of April. He's largely basing his decision on predictions from the University of Washington that even if the nation sticks to the shutdown, 83,967 Americans will die of coronavirus by early August, including 15,788 in New York state.

Deaths will likely soar over ...Read more

Congress passed and the president signed a $2 trillion "stimulus" bill.

"Not enough!" shrieked politicians. They said the government must do more.

They demanded President Donald Trump reactivate the Defense Production Act, a 1950 law that lets government force companies to make things.

Trump hesitated.

That upset lovers of big ...Read more

Americans are rightfully engaging in prudential measures to protect themselves, their families and their communities from COVID-19.

But as this virus -- and the reaction to it -- has advanced, Americans have seen another more ancient threat reemerge in our society: excessive government.

While COVID-19 is a threat to human health, excessive ...Read more

"There are no libertarians in a global pandemic." So goes the smug punchline of large-government advocates who point to the necessity of collective action in the face of an unprecedented global crisis. Without government, they say, we'd all be dead.

Few libertarians would disagree. The hardcore libertarians at Reason magazine aren't spending ...Read more

A little less than two months ago, the U.S. State Department made a curious announcement that suggests President Trump's "America First" administration put "China First" at a critical moment during the burgeoning Wuhan pandemic.

I asked the State Department about the controversy this week -- and the vague and nonresponsive responses I received ...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- It's not just toilet paper that is in short supply. Americans are also suffering through a shortage of common sense.

Having more of it would allow them to put aside politics and partisanship long enough to consider the possibility that there's already a drug on the market that might be effective in treating COVID-19.

If that's ...Read more

The enormous coronavirus stimulus package was festooned with goodies for key Democratic constituency groups including $75 million in "emergency" funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which offers grants to PBS and NPR stations. That's on top of the half-billion Congress already authorized for the year.

They call it "public" ...Read more

I'm not sure whether COVID-19, first identified in Wuhan, China, in the U.S. qualifies as a true disaster. Putting the disease in perspective, we might look at current influenza illnesses. According to Centers for Disease Control estimates, between Oct. 1, 2019, and March 14, 2020, there have been 390,000 to 710,000 hospitalizations as a result ...Read more

PARIS -- When psychiatric patients are admitted to the hospital in hysteria, they're often placed in solitary confinement -- the proverbial "padded cell." Their exposure to external stimuli is tightly regulated. Supposedly, it gives them a sense of safety and reassurance that no harm can come to them while they're in there. It also minimizes ...Read more

CHAMBERSBURG, Pennsylvania -- It is early Sunday morning along one of the few congested stretches of the Lincoln Highway when an empty parking lot below the familiar cheery yellow sign for the local Waffle House catches the eye.

The 24-hour diner chain, born in the Atlanta suburbs 65 years ago and now spreading across 25 states with nearly 2,...Read more

Politics being politics, and politicians being politicians, Americans have figured out how, along with sore throats and violent coughing, the coronavirus causes finger-pointing, loud talking and endless credit-claiming.

The best remedy I know of: huge handfuls of salt for sprinkling on the gratitude that comes with seeing government now and ...Read more

If there is one thing on which you'd think left and right could agree, it would be the proper response to the present coronavirus. After all, COVID-19 doesn't distinguish between left and right: Conservatives and liberals are just as likely to contract and even die from it.

Yet, it's amazing how consistently left and right differ on even this ...Read more

It is not cognitive dissonance -- the impossibility of holding two or more contradictory beliefs simultaneously -- to favor the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill passed by Congress and signed by President Trump while at ...Read more

"This is the question that is going to dominate the election: How did you perform in the great crisis?"

So says GOP Congressman Tom Cole of Oklahoma in today's New York Times.

GOP National Committeeman Henry Barbour of Mississippi calls the crisis "a defining moment... The more (Trump) reassures Americans, gives them the facts and delivers ...Read more

"Government help to business is just as disastrous as government persecution. ... The only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off." -- Ayn Rand

Congress has just approved an economically bloated $2.2 trillion spending relief bill, an amount more substantial than the GDP of all but a handful of ...Read more

On Jan. 20, the United States confirmed its first case of the coronavirus. The nation's political and media elite obsessed over Mitch McConnell's just-announced resolution governing the impeachment trial of Donald Trump.

On Jan. 23, China locked down the city of Wuhan. Cable news in America lit up with praise for the epic, nay historic, ...Read more

During this coronavirus shutdown, as so many of us have become unmoored, finding it difficult to process all the changes we're facing, I wondered:

What's the safe way during the pandemic to tell the neighbors you're moving after 25 years in your home?

You can't hug them. Email is so infuriatingly sterile. Handwritten notes on fine stationery ...Read more

Obviously, we are a very badly divided nation: so divided we agree on virtually nothing; so divided we can't even talk to one another anymore; so divided one side doesn't believe in anything the other side says; so divided California, New York and Illinois might as well be on a different planet than Texas.

We can't even agree on how to respond ...Read more